Mediaplayers

IKCC Story in Winnipeg's UPTOWN

Documentary project brings the Inuit perspective on climate change to the world stage

Marlo Campbell

"Inuit are on the front lines of climate change," says Ian Mauro over the phone from Igloolik, Nunavut.

The
temperature in the small northern community (population: 1,538) is
hovering just above -30 C as we speak, at a time of year when the sun
rises at 11 a.m. and sets by 1:30 p.m. From his window, Mauro can see
people on Ski-Doos and a man carrying a rifle.

"The arctic is
warming faster than anywhere in the world, and so the people who live
in these areas have a lot of knowledge about the changes because they
see them," he continues. "You talk to these hunters who have lived on
the land, dog-teamed around day and night, winter and summer, have been
all over this region, they know things that scientists are baffled by."

Documenting
and disseminating that observational knowledge are at the heart of a
innovative collaboration between Mauro - a 30-year-old Winnipegger with
a PhD in environmental studies from the University of Manitoba who's
now doing post-doctorate work at the University of Victoria - and
Zacharias Kunuk, the 51-year-old Igloolik-based Inuit filmmaker whose
multiple-award-winning 2001 film, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, was the
first feature-length Canadian movie to be written, directed and acted
entirely in Inuktitut.

The two men met last fall at a
conference and decided to team up on a documentary film and Internet
research project called Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change. This past
spring, they conducted over 60 interviews with Inuit elders, hunters,
women and youth in four Nunavut communities - Pangnirtung, Iqaluit,
Resolute Bay and Igloolik.

So what have the locals been saying?

"A
lot," says Kunuk. "They're telling us the sun does not rise where it
used to. It's shifted to the right and sets further to the right. The
elders think our world has tilted because in the summertime, the sun is
way above us and the guiding stars that they used in the dog-team days
are not in the right places.

"When I ask them, 'Where do you
think it's coming from?' they always say, 'It's coming from the sea.'
The sea's warming up - that causes thin ice, early breakups, tilting of
the earth.

"Everything's gone whack," he adds. "Even the wind."

Mauro
has found some corroboration for such claims in peer-reviewed
scientific literature, although researchers have yet to agree on the
cause. With respect to the wind, he points to uqalurait, tongue-shaped
snowdrifts that pepper the barren landscape, created each year by the
North wind. For hundreds of years, uqalurait have been used by hunters
as directional markers; recently, they've begun to change position.

The
documentary is not yet completed, but the project has already caught
the attention of the international community, thanks to its
multi-platform website, www.isuma.tv/IKCC.

COP-15,
the United Nation's climate change conference (at which some 15,000
representatives from 192 countries will attempt to hammer out a
successor to the Kyoto Protocol), is taking place in Copenhagen,
Denmark, from Dec. 7 to 18. Mauro and Kunuk have been invited by the
UN's University to screen a 15-minute trailer of their work-in-progress
at the Indigenous Voice on Climate Change film festival, running at the
National Museum of Denmark in conjunction with the global negotiations.

Noting
the "profound irony" of thousands of people flying across the world for
a discussion on how to reduce carbon emissions, the two have decided
against presenting in person.

"We had seriously considered it
but, for us, the priority is to stay in the arctic, represent these
Inuit views that we're hearing and do honour and justice to them by
making the best film that we can make," Mauro says.

Still,
that's not to say the two aren't interested in engaging with as many
people as possible. In addition to writing a daily blog and uploading
raw footage to the site, they've begun hosting live webcasts of their
editing sessions in Igloolik every Thursday from 8 to 10 p.m. EST.
Viewers are being encouraged to skype in and ask questions.

"It's
a pretty neat kind of behind-the-curtain opportunity for people who are
interested in climate change, but also people who are interested in
filmmaking," Mauro says.

The Thursday-night live webcasts will
continue until mid-January. Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change will be
released as a feature-length documentary in 2010.

A group of Nunavut elders travel to five museums in North America to see and identify artifacts, tools and clothing collected from their Inuit ancestors. Directed by Zacharias Kunuk and Bernadette Dean.